iPod Touch. My iPod Touch.
December 16th, 2007
So what’s going on here? I finally broke my own promise to myself not to buy an iPod just yet. As impulsive as it may be, this is because I found out that yesterday, when I was chatting with Andira, there’s a midnight sale at Senayan City’s iBox (I found this out from a friend that’s living in Melbourne. Where the hell was I?), and that the lowest price I could get is Rp. 1,699,000. I thought, hey, why not give it a try? It’s an iPod Touch, and any iPod Touch with that kind of price tag is most likely a good deal, don’t you think?
Then there was I jumped out of my chair and cruising down to Senayan City, in hope that I could snatch the thing with a very good deal. After I arrived, it turns out that there’s a set of terms and conditions applied. Just as I suspected, there’s always a catch. Apparently not all of the purchasable iPods are tagged with a Rp. 1,699,000 price tag. There are several tiers of pricing discounts that you would have to pick (by luck) from a bowl. At this point, I thought why don’t I just try my luck. When the queue reaches to mine, I pulled the tag, rolled inside a cut straw, from the bowl, and I got the Rp. 2,299,000 price tag. I decided to take the iPod anyway. It’s an iPod Touch, 8GB, from a listed price of Rp. 3,199,000. That’s a Rp. 900,000 discount of the shelf price, and chances like this doesn’t exactly come everyday.
Now comes the review. First of all, if any of you bought the iPod Touch and expected that you would get a similar iPod like the Nano or the Classic, then you’ll be disappointed. When you relate the price to capacity ratio and compared the Touch and the Classic, you’ll get what I mean. So, for you who wants to buy the iPod Touch with that kind of perspective, I suggest you skip the idea and buy the Classic without any question. But if you want something more sophisticated than the Nano, and have some extra cash, then go for the iPod Touch. Price-wise, without a discount, it’s rather expensive.
When it comes to playing music, it really does what it’s designed for, and yes, it does worked as advertised. The sound quality is adequate, if not good, it’s responsive, the animations are slick and responds brilliantly to your expectations, or at least, in this case, mine. The YouTube player also performs well, provided that you have a good internet connection. The video player and photo browser also performs nicely. So no complains there. I read that this is actually the iPhone without the phone. Well, it’s true.
As for the other features beside music playing, I would have to say that I’m a bit disappointed with the factory defaults. First of all, by default, although the Contacts allow us to edit the entries, the Calendar does not. Second, while I was testing Meebo with the built-in Safari, the keyboard’s predictive text input is so annoying, and there’s no way to turn it off. Third, as it is a closed-platform, there’s no way for us to install additional applications that might help us to turn the iPod Touch into a PDA replacement. Therefore I decided to jailbreak it.
After the jailbreak, which is an easy procedure from jailbreakme.com, everything was opened before my very eyes. I then downloaded the Calendar patch, and now I can edit my schedules as I go. I also downloaded the patch so that I can disable the predictive text input. So there we go, two of my disappointments cured. I’ve also added the Apollo IM application, but although it can’t completely replace my Adium when I’m not home, that might probably come in handy someday. Let’s just hope one day, Wi-Fi is free on every single mall in Jakarta.
I am a true Apple fan, right from the moment I switched to my beloved iMac a couple years ago, I would never, whenever possible, to go back to any Microsoft shits. But I would have to say that I’m a bit disappointed with the whole closed-platform thing for the iPod Touch/iPhone. From the way I see it, having additional applications could be useful, not to mention to keep the iPod Touch/iPhone above the average smartphone, which are mostly crappy. But nevertheless, turning the iPod Touch into something useful is not something that’s impossible. I’d give it 8.5 out of 10 anyday.
Compared to the Zune? Well, just like Craig Ferguson said, the Zune zucked.